#38 "The Codec Wars"

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. My name's Jason Whetstone, senior workflow engineer at Chesapeake systems. This is episode 38, the codec Wars. And with me in the studio as usual, I have my cohost Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect. Hi Ben. Hi there. How are you doing? Good. Awesome. Uh, so the codec Wars, what, what are we talking about today? We're talking about, uh, all of these different sort of, uh, camera formats and codecs and how this information is captured on a, this non-volatile media that needs to be ingested into your NLE or your ma'am or your sand or whatever it is you're working on and doing post production on. So, you know, all these cameras have their native formats and every manufacturer has their idea of what the best way to store that information, compress that information, get it all on one card. What does the manifest look like? Speaker 0 00:53 How many files are we talking about? They all have different ways of doing this and that makes our job and your job a little bit of a nightmare. So we're going to just kind of pull that apart a little bit today and talk about if anybody's figured it out, if there are any solutions out there on the table. And with us today, we have over, uh, over the internet waves of internet. We have Nick Smith of JB and a distribution. Nick is the vice president of technology at JB and Hey, how's it going Nick? I'm pretty good. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Thank you for being here. Thanks for taking the time. So, uh, let's just start off a little bit talking about JB and a and, and, and Nick and what you do for JB and a. So, uh, what is your role there? How long have you been there? Let's start there. Speaker 1 01:40 Coming up on nine years. I can't believe it's been that long already, but here I find myself nine years later. Um, I truly, I guess the easiest way to explain it is I made a translator. I help people understand the technology, uh, in layman's terms, in technical terms, whichever side they may find themselves. But I typically sit between the manufacturers and the resellers and the systems integrators and the end users to help them understand what these products are supposed to do for them and how they would better work together. Speaker 0 02:11 Yeah. I would imagine you find yourself in a, in front of varying degrees of technical understanding and know how, uh, on, on all of these different ends Speaker 1 02:21 Of the spectrum. Yeah. The ones who just want to have a single button to push to the ones who really want to understand the, you know, the ins and outs on the, on the backside of the box. Yeah. It's, it's, it's all over the map, which makes it fun because it challenges me to learn how to communicate in different ways. Uh, you know, how do I step it up? How do I step it down on a daily basis? Speaker 0 02:38 So it, it strikes me that, uh, that, that JB and a and chess, I have a little bit in common. So how do we work together? Let's talk a little bit about that. Speaker 1 02:46 Yeah. So I mean, JB nays goal here is we bring products to market. We help manufacturers find a pathway to the end users. And through that we do it through the channel. And through the channel for us is partners like Chesa who understand the technologies and can implement them and be the feet on the street holding their client's hands through the process. And so we look for partners like, like you all that can be that for the end user because we can't be everywhere nor do we want to be everywhere. But we want to work with partners who can see their client's needs, you know, sort of meet it out from day to day. And so we find partners like yourselves, we work with you all to take these technologies to your clients, to your end users, the ones that really, really need them. And so for us it's all about channel business and you know, helping these manufacturers find avenues into that channel. Speaker 0 03:35 So the technology supply chain goes from vendor to distributor to reseller or integrator and to the client. And you guys are that distributors stop. So you help sort out like what's a good vendor, what's a bad vendor, what's a good product? What's a bad product and then you bring it to us as the distributor. No, as the reasonably Diller slash. Integrator. Yup. Yeah. Speaker 1 04:02 Well I'm going to need a copy of this recording later cause that was perfectly put for, yeah, I mean for the text plainer, you just did it in 30 seconds or less. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you know, and, and because, and part of the reason we figured out is the manufacturers that sell direct have too much time invested in that one client and they can't focus on their technology, but the manufacturers who allow the channel to facilitate that business and connect that technology into the rest of the ecosystem, those end users have a better experience. Right? Because you guys are Speaker 0 04:34 Sort of quintessential example of maybe a software vendor who's doing their own deployments, uh, into, uh, an environment that, uh, maybe has storage, networking, archive, all of these different technologies and components that that vendor can not possibly be an expert in. Uh, they, we, you know, we, we would hope that they're an expert in their own software. But, uh, just because you're an expert in your own software doesn't mean you're an expert in San versus NAS or a, you know, how they, how they work differently, how they work. Similarly, uh, object storage versus LTO tape archive, how they work differently from each other. So that's where we want to lean on an integrator maybe for something like that. Right. So, um, so JB and I really helps us sort of qualify those, those, those products. Speaker 1 05:21 Yeah. In my mind, an engineer isn't somebody who focuses on what one product does, but what the impact of the products to the left and to the right of it. Right? So what is the bigger picture? How does the data flow, how does the signal flow and by placing this component in the data stream, what's the impact to all the files or the, the, the pieces downstream of that? Right. That's what we as engineers have to be looking at is that bigger picture. And that's sort of what I focus on in the company is taking these manufacturers, helping them understand what their role is in the ecosystem, how to connect to other products. In the ecosystem and then how to create bigger solutions out of that. Speaker 2 05:56 Nice. So how the heck did you get started doing that? Yeah. Yeah. Tell us the story of how you got into this crazy business. Speaker 1 06:04 Yeah. It really, so I truly grew up in a barn in the woods. Um, and uh, it's, that's kind of sad. So my parents moved me from Carmel, California near the ocean when I was young to South of Lake Tahoe in the middle of the woods with no electricity. We got the first telephone on the Hill, but we always had computers. My dad was realized early, early on that, you know, this technology thing was amazing. And so the first Macs that came out, we had them, we had to turn on a generator to run them. But we had, you know, the computers and we were Speaker 2 06:36 Learning, hold on a second. You, you, you literally had to use a generator to power your computer. Like you weren't kidding when you said no electricity. No, no. Literally Speaker 1 06:45 No electricity. So we had, um, we used a wood cook stove to heat water for showers. We cooked in that stove. We um, didn't get electricity to that house I think until like 15 years later. But my dad had taken a old engine and converted it to a propane generator. We had a switch in the house. So when it was time to do homework on the computer, you fired up the generator. Of course you had to plan things out. You were also going to wash clothes during that time. You did anything that required electricity, you planned it out. Um, and including watching Nightrider and Friday nights with my brothers and you know, I mean there was things like that that was, it was, it was all about, you know, planning and, but we had the technology and you know, and it's kind of funny cause of there were five boys, all but one went into technology. They're all working for big tech companies. They're all, you know, in technology. But we came from a very technologically devoid area, so to speak. It's pretty awesome. Speaker 2 07:41 So your dad, was he running from a foreign government who's trying to destroy him? Is your last name really born? Speaker 1 07:51 Yeah. I wish I would be so much more fun. Now. My dad, my dad was a car mechanic. He actually, I call him mad scientist really and truly he, um, he designed just so many strange ways of doing things. And I think my way of thinking, and this is a bad word, I'm going to reference it, but out of the box comes from him and comes from his approach to doing things different. We had, you know, rather than run kerosene lanterns in the house, we had low voltage, 12 volt lighting throughout the house, which was powered off of big truck batteries. But when you ran the generator would recharge those. So you'd have this point in the day when the lights would start to dim a little bit and you go, okay, it's time to run the generator, charge the batteries up a little bit, run the house a little bit more. And so he just, he always thought differently and tried to come up with different ways. He, even as a mechanic, he built some of his own tools because he'd recognize there's a better way to do this. Nobody's doing it for me. So I'll do it. I'll build the, the, the tool, the jig all welded together and all come up with a better way of solving this problem. Speaker 2 08:49 Got it. So your dad is an alien scientist hiding from the intergalactic star beliefs? Speaker 1 08:56 Absolutely. Absolutely. But we had CompuServe, we had AOL, so we weren't, you know, totally out of connection with the world from that perspective. Speaker 0 09:07 That's pretty fantastic. And I think, um, I, I don't know that Ben, that you and I have talked about our background stories, but sure. I thought, you know, I thought we were roughing it, you know. Um, I grew up in a log house. My family still lives there. My hope, my entire family still lives in that log house. And uh, yeah. And it's funny you said about not getting electricity in that house until about 15 years later. My parents did not get air conditioning in their house until my sister and I went to high school and college. Actually I think, I think it was when my sister went to college. That would have been four years after I left the house. They finally decided to get air conditioning. And I remember just like, you know, my sister and I were just like, what mom and dad are going to get there. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. Uh, and I thought, I thought we were roughing it cause I'd go over to my friend's houses and it would be so nice and cool in their house and just like, you know, and they had cable TV, cool rotary control. It was quickly between channels. Yeah. Speaker 1 10:06 But I had an antenna on the top of a tree. Awesome. Now what I want to kind of, what I wanted to pick up Speaker 0 10:13 On there about your story was just, uh, you know, I, I that's sort of, uh, doing something differently than, than, than anyone's ever done before. Seeing a need and just sort of, you know, grasping the opportunity to, you know, to, to make something better, which I think is something that we all have in common here. I mean, I see that in a lot of people that we talk to on a regular basis in this industry, including all of my coworkers right here at Chesa. But, uh, so, uh, we are here to talk a little bit about codex and, um, what, you know, what is going on in the industry today. So what do you see going on? What do you see, uh, good, the bad, the ugly, uh, specifically about these codecs? What are you thinking? Speaker 1 10:58 Well, I mean, on the, on the good side, you know, if we follow Moore's law, things are getting faster and better, right? Uh, you know, that's another bad word. I never liked to use Moore's law, but, but from the concept of being able to generate codex at a chip level now, and you look at Mac with or with Apple with a new Mac that releasing and they've got a, an accelerator card in the computer now for accelerating pro Rez, right? We see new tech releasing a ship for NDI. So I think from the, through the acceleration side, like we're, we've reached a pinnacle point here where so much can be done on a chip now, which was a, we went away from that for a long time for, you know, in the early days everything was on a chip. Then we went to software defined. Speaker 1 11:37 Now we're kind of coming back to the evolution of being able to do it on a chip. It's just a slightly different chip for perspective sake. So it's giving us access to better, faster codecs, right? We can transcode faster, we can encode faster, we can do all these things faster, which are creating more real time workflows on the other side. The bad side is it's just a lack of consistency in the industry. Right. And I think this part of where the codec Wars comes from, it's this concept that there's just too many codecs. There's, there is no one winner per se. It's Sony's got, there's Panasonic has, there's JVC borrows from everybody else. Like literally, I mean there's just too many code. I think at one point when we were deciphered MXF I counted 26 or, or 30 variants of MXF. Well it's a, it's a mess. Speaker 1 12:20 And that I think is the thing that's actually holding the industry back. Because you and I and you know the rest of us on this side of the, you know, the engineering side, we're always trying to come up with waste and we spend more time deciphering what codex people have, which ones they're using. How is the impact of that? How long is it going to take to transcode those do, can we play those file format? Oh yeah. Right. I mean, you know, if that makes sense. Great. Well what's the essence on the inside is, you know, and so it's, you know, I always liken it to a candy bar. I don't care what the rapper says on the outside. Does it have new good on the inside or not? Right. So I love that it's, it's a mess. It's an utter, utter mess in my mind. So what does that mean Speaker 0 12:57 For, you know, for creatives though? Sure. That that sounds very democratic and very sort of free marketing that that's, that's a good thing, right? But what about the end users? Like what, what kinds of impacts does it have? Speaker 1 13:08 Well, I think from the end user's perspective, it's, it's a lack of understanding of where to go. Right? I mean, people drive towards things like pro Rez because Apple's behind it. But is that really the best plan to go with something that is driven by a hardware manufacturer that wants your almighty, you know, 99 cents a week? Like that's, that to me is the struggle. It's where do I go? Which codex should I use because I'm going to buy a camera and I'm going to choose the camera on the lens, but then I'm restrained to the codec that's on the camera. And is that Speaker 0 13:38 Like what, you know, what do we do after the shoot? You know, what happens to the media? Do we, do we transcode the mezzanine? I mean premier can edit this stuff, right? I can just drag it and I can drag my card into premiere and start editing. Right? So, Speaker 1 13:50 Well and that, and I think premiere kind of screwed everybody up on that of this concept of I don't have to use them as an encoder. Hey, whatever you want. Right. We're good. I mean the old concept of final cut and back in the day in seven of having to render every time you made a cut, that forced you to think a little more, um, that forced you to really think through your Kodak choices. Now it was just like, Hey, pull in whatever you want, slamming on the timeline. It's good. That's not a great plan. That's not a plan at all. So, Speaker 0 14:15 And I think the thing that I find, my sort of conversation that I find myself having a lot with people is, uh, we, you know, what happens to these files? Like, what is your expectation in terms of like, okay, okay, so you, you've had a, you know, maybe when final cut pro seven was, was, was end of life, maybe you switched to premiere. Okay. We, we find that in many, many, many different facilities, people have switched to premiere. So they're using premier. That's great. It's a great product. It's great. And Ali, uh, can edit pretty much anything. But then so, so we find that there's this gap between final cut pro seven gone. Now we have premier, maybe years have passed. I mean, that was what, eight, nine years ago. And, uh, now it's like, okay, so now we have this full sand and it's, uh, 500 terabytes or it's a petabyte or whatever and we can't find anything and we need to bring in a, ma'am. Speaker 0 15:10 So we have all these, you know, sequences and premiere and all these projects and everything and they're all referencing this source media that we just started editing with because we could now what do we do with all of it? And you know, now, so now we're talking about post production and how post-production and media asset management and storage, because again, all these codecs, different sizes, different levels of compression, all that kind of stuff, different bandwidth requirements and then different file structures and different ways of dealing with whether these files need to remain intact for the camera card essence or whatever it is to be like worth anything to anyone. So, uh, that, that's, that's the discussion that I find myself having is just trying to get people to understand why, you know, why we needed to render and why it was not such a terrible thing. Even though it took a little bit of time, right? Speaker 1 16:01 Yeah. The value of a proxy. Right. And a proxy based workflow. I mean it's something that avid sort of pioneered and everybody else said, why bother? Well, there's a good reason for it. Right. And because, and that's one of the things that, you know, we think about, it's like, well it impacts the storage. How much space am I using? How, what's my connection speed? So I have to have fiber channel, can I go with a lower, you know, a compressed codec for proxy editing. I mean, these are decisions that we don't always think through because the focus is, well, my NLP can handle anything. So why wouldn't, I sure. Does your, is your storage capable? Is the drive in your, you know, I mean, this whole concept of hanging a hard drive off my computer, it's fast enough cause it's Thunderbolt. Is it, you know, and is it necessary and what impact do I have by going with a direct connect drive versus a shared storage? Speaker 3 16:44 Yeah. I get more scared, uh, as we've get getting faster and faster SSDs and our laptops, most people who haven't had the formative experience of a single hard drive or a raid zero and trying to work up to a raid five and Oh God, we finally got a San and God, that's fast. Now we've got a couple of gigabytes a second in our laptop. And kids, kids today just won't know the value of actual speed and aggregate bandwidth. Speaker 1 17:16 Absolutely. And the, yeah. And then, thank you. <inaudible> get off my lawn. But you're right. I mean look, so you guys can't see this cause you're not walking, you know, if you're not viewing, it's a, an MVME drive in my hand. I thought it was a candy bar. Rice. I seriously thought it was a candy bar, but it's, but it's, this is blazingly fast storage faster than a lot of sands can be on a, you know, in a, in a smaller environment. But there's these types of things push people away for, well, why would I bother in a shared storage solution when I can spend very little money to get something that's fast enough to edit my few streams, you know, that I'm working on and tools like this kind of muck it up again. Right? And stop people from thinking bigger picture. Uh, you know, I mean, when, when we coach people on storage, I always, you know, they're like, well, here's what I've got in terms of local hard drives right now. Speaker 1 18:09 And I'm like, well, that's great. That's what you have sitting on local hard drives, right? But let's think bigger picture. How much do you generate in a week, a month, a year? What's the retention rate on that? What are the policies to that? Do you really need to keep all that stuff on storage better yet? How many of those are duplicated files? Because you've been swapping hard drives all over copying from drive to drive and you know, your editor to your left borrowed a file, copied it to his drive. Now you've got 27 copies of that same file. Great. So, yeah, so hence the point for a man, but also centralized storage because the reality is by the time we compile all that stuff, you probably have a third of the data you actually think you have, right? Or a third of the data you actually need to keep. So, but you can't do that if you're going to maintain this mentality of I'm just going to have a drive that I plug into my computer for the moment. Speaker 2 18:54 Right. So we, we find ourselves, you know, on, on the file, just the sort of file level. Because a lot of these media asset management platforms are very file based. You know, they're, here's a video that I want to ingest and it's a file. It's a.mov or a dot MXF and I'm going to ingest it. Oh. But you know, when I, when I dropped all this into premiere, it wasn't a file. It was a camera card. You know? So how does that work? So that's a big thing. The deceptive codecs coming in from cameras are complicated. Yeah. And what is the intermediary between there and how do we organize people? Right. We've got a structure that middle ground because once you go from being two guys with two laptops or IMAX or whatever, in a shop to a group of 20 people or 50 people and you have to have a couple of petabytes and you've got to understand how 50 people work together, organize things together and deliver things together. That's a much different story. And you know, go head and neck. Yeah. Speaker 1 19:58 Well I was gonna say, and not everybody needs to be connected to that sand. Sure. I mean that's the biggest story. It's like we, we look at connectivity or I need everybody to be able to see the files. No, no, you don't. There are great tools out there to be able to share the files without giving access to the files, which adds a layer of security and organization. I'm always worried about somebody deleting files. Well, don't give them access. Right. Give them an interface. We're, we're a very web based world. We love interfaces, our phones, our tablets, all these devices. Right? Well, there's an interface for that. Just like there's an app for that, right? There's truly an interface for viewing content without having to access the content, which will allow you to centralize the storage, allow you to share the media, allow you to have a conversation around the content, right. Speaker 1 20:41 With what to do with it. And then that's part of what helps break the Kodak issues because now we're not worried about what codex they're in because we're going to deliver a web viewable codec version to you that allows Sue over in marketing who's running on a PC without a lot of Ram to playback what, what would be a pro Rez file. Right, right. That's, that's the big Delta. And it's, it's thinking through that process of you look, there's a better way to do this if you just take five minutes to sit down and whiteboard. Speaker 0 21:09 Yup. And that, you know, that sounds great for maybe a shop that uses one particular manufacturer's codex. I mean, I know there's many, many different variants of MXF for example. But, um, on top of that, we have organizations that are really just tasked with managing media that they acquire from partners, whether it's like post-production houses or, uh, mainly post-production houses. But it could be a, you know, uh, someone who's tasked with keeping an archive of, you know, this media from all over the place. Maybe it's not even video footage, maybe it's audio and maybe it's images and all kinds of stuff that really presents an interesting challenge for them because they may not even know what formats all of this stuff is in. They just get a drive because that's what they're supposed to do and figure it out, you know? So, uh, this Kodak war makes things really, really difficult for organizations like that because they almost have to have like the Swiss army knife of understanding how these, how all these formats work. Speaker 1 22:09 Yup. Yeah. And they're not typically in control of their media, right. When we think about it, like the production industry is very transitory. Um, and, and klepto at the same time, right? So, so first, I mean, you've got content creators that are running around and they, they, they more freelance. They go from project to project, they work where they want to work, they work on projects, they want to work. So because of that, your content is always coming in from different sources. And that content is being driven by the person behind the camera. What's their preference? Oh, a mechanic. I'm a Sony guy. I shoot archery. Right? So that content could be constantly changing. Like you said, the codec, you don't, you don't have a lot of control over the incoming side of it unless you literally control the entire chain. So getting that content in all these different formats. Speaker 1 22:51 I mean, if I think of some of the corporate places I've seen, it's, you know, they change, they change videographers every two years. Well, every time that change happens, the new one has a different preference on camera. Right? Well, I prefer Fuji lenses, so I'm going to go with these instead. Right? And so suddenly the content you, you look through the cycle of media with several years and you can see the constant Kodak changes throughout the years and you can pin it to who the shooter was, right. And then add into the fact, I said they're kleptomaniacs, I was wrong. And they're not kleptomaniacs, they're pack rats. They never want to throw anything away. Right. Video is gold. I paid a lot of money. That camera was expensive. The freelancer rehired cost me a lot. Therefore working to keep that asset, whether it has value or not, right. Video. Yeah, video hoarding. Right. I mean there should be a show for this. I think this is eventual video idea. Like this is going to be, you know, you got the order show and then you get the video hoarder show. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's that closet you open up and there's 300 Berridge hard drives sitting on a shelf. Wow. That was, that was, yeah. Speaker 3 23:45 37 year old man with a sand in his basement who's ripped every episode of every cartoon known to man and he's going to save the universe Speaker 1 23:55 And he still has every Mackey ever bought, right? Cause they're all lined up on shelves. The bond, I blew one that's running the original premier three. Oh, I mean it's like literally goes way, way back. It's disturbing. Actually the most nightmare one I ever had is I went to visit a client and the client was stressing over whether they should start shooting in four K. And I'm like, okay, well that's, you know, let's, let's talk about your workflow. Then I go over to their office and I said, well where's your archive? And he opens up the closet door. That was the water heater room. And there's like literally 50 hard drives, bare hard drives just sitting on shelves three feet from the water heater. And I said, you know, you're, my fear for you is not whether you should start shooting in four K. It's whether you start archiving today, right? Speaker 1 24:32 Like, like LTO. Now you need to pull the trigger ASAP because you know that water heater blows your entire archive has gone history. You know, and that's, but that, that pack rat mentality that we have as video producers, content producers is some day this moment could be valuable, therefore we need a place to put it. So what is that medium? And then how do we manage it and what Kodak do we keep it in longterm? I mean, do I really need to store it in pro Rez? Sure, I do. Maybe I don't. Right. It's just, Speaker 0 25:02 It's not just the acquisition or the capture the media. It's the preservation. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Speaker 3 25:06 But it's also, you don't want to waste storage capacity on storing data that's not actually there. Right. If you have something that is acidy and you're recording it, you know, via H D don't do that. You don't need, um, a codec that is faster or can hold more data than there is actually data there. Speaker 0 25:27 Sure. Speaker 1 25:28 Absolutely. Yeah. A buddy of mine was a red Ninja and he, um, one of the original red ninjas and he was out helping people figure out how to use these cameras. Cause at the time they were just too complicated and too unusable. This was like, you know, the early, early versions when he finally bought his own camera, he ended up buying a 10 ADP camera. And I'm like, why? And he goes, well, the reality is we shoot four K on these reds, but most people end up posting and producing in seven 20 and sending their content out. Right. So it was like, it was this idea of over sampling, right. We're constantly over sampling the data, but really the reality is it ends up watching it on a phone. Speaker 0 26:00 Yep, absolutely. I mean, there's the whole idea of like, someday there may be a special super remastered version of this and you know, 10,000 <inaudible>. So yes, we need to shoot it in the highest possible quality. Speaker 1 26:12 It's gotta be uncompressed, it's gotta be raw because, you know, I need to hire somebody deep. Bayer. It for me. Um, I mean it gives somebody a job, so that's great. Speaker 0 26:22 But it's, you know, in many cases it's a very distinct possibility that that could happen. There are many times where I'm like, you know, I'm just going to use the example of a Farscape the scifi original that, when was that on 10 years ago. 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I loved that show. So you can watch it on Amazon prime, but not in HD. And Speaker 1 26:44 There are parts of me that are just like, I wish they would have it. Cause I mean that's a beautiful show. It's very well done. It's very beautifully done. And uh, love to be able to see it in HD, you know? Yep. So we wouldn't be talking about this today if it weren't, you know, I know some of, some of our listeners are probably like, okay, yeah. All right, so you're not really telling me anything. I don't really don't, you know, don't already know. Right. So why are we talking about it? Is there any progress being made? Is that, is there any change being made? You know, is this a, is this something for the market to solve? Is this something for Chessa to solve? And people like us as you know, I don't know that I have the answer yet. I mean, here's what I know. Speaker 1 27:24 Like when we look at the broadcast industry, there is a somewhat governing board over the top of it, right? You know, you got NAB, you got a couple of organizations that are really focused on, you know, things like codecs and broadcast standards and those types of elements, right? And so you look at CMTS pioneering a new way of transmitting video over IP so that you can get off of the SDI cable and they're calling it, you know, 2110 or whatever flavor it is this week because I think it changes literally every two months. But the reality is they're at least working towards a unification of how they're going to share information and data. And that includes how the audio tracks roll out, how the subtitles roll out, like how all of that data is going to flow so that it can be shared through stations, through, you know, ownerships groups through satellites. Speaker 1 28:14 Great. Well, when I look at the post production side of the industry, so where's that board? Where's that group that's defining a path like that for post-production around the globe? And I don't see it, I don't see anybody really putting their foot down and saying, guys, we don't need 26 variants of MXF. We don't need six versions of pro Rez in 26 versions of avid codex. Right? We need, we need to find more ways to share media simpler between, you know, a better interchange format and they're really, I don't see a governing board on the post production side. I don't see one place like we, people ask us, well, where do we get some people to get certified in this industry? Like the reason one like is because it's sort of driven by the manufacturers in the content. Sony drives their own codex, JVC borrows Panasonic drives their codex red built their own. Speaker 1 29:01 Ari decided to make changes to that do their own. Everybody's doing their own thing because they think it differentiates themselves. But it's creating this splintering in the industry. Right? And how many versions of raid are there? How many different file systems are there? Granted, they all have value right in that side of it. But in the end it creates a window for you and I to help translate and communicate and pin the right technology. But it creates a lot of confusion for the end users. Defining which direction do I go so bad for? The users may be good for us when somebody has got to be the trusted advisor. Right? Right. The good news is they keep pushing the envelope. Quality Speaker 2 29:42 Keeps getting better. We get better in better media every year. Um, so there's reasons for different forms, right? We're in the golden age of media creation. We have more awesome shows to watch than we ever have. Um, thank God because we need to be distracted on a daily basis from everything else that's happening in the world. Um, so, so yeah, I think there, there are a lot of good things happening. What about that? Go ahead Nick. Speaker 1 30:08 I was gonna say, I mean the, the you, you mentioned, you know, Amazon prime, I mean the democratization of video sharing. I mean if you think back in the early days to get a film produced to get a film distributed, the amount of effort, you know, and, and you ended up just being a, a box on a shelf and a blockbuster that nobody ever saw in a movie theater that day is now flipped to, and now you're a title on a slider on Amazon, on Netflix, on Hulu somewhere. But at least you have access and people can find you now in a way they never could before. Right. You know, so this ability to get content out there is phenomenal. Right. I love it. Actually. You know, it's funny cause Netflix, when you look at like discovery back in the day for LTO distribution, right? Speaker 1 30:47 They sort of put a line in the same, this is how you're going to send content to us on LTO, has to be in this format, has to be done this way. I thought that was phenomenal because it sort of laid down a line and then you saw all these people adopt it. Well now you're seeing that with Netflix, right? Where there, where there, Hey, here's how you're going to deliver to us. And now other organizations like Disney and others are adapting to that same model saying, okay, cool. We're gonna, we're all gonna sit in this same file format, the same Kodak translation, the same wrapper so that we can transmit data easier between each other. But that's only on the distribution side. That's not on the ingest side, that's not on the codex side. On the camera side post production. Speaker 2 31:25 Yeah. Right. Yeah. Where, where all that content is sort of being manipulated and, and the stories are being created and told and you know, uh, so yeah, it, it's interesting we had talked about this previously that in this post production space, we don't really have a specific governing body, but we also don't have a lot of education. Uh, you know, you think of um, uh, you know, film schools and you think of like, Oh yeah, this person has a degree in film or whatever. Uh, this person might have a degree in cinematography or, uh, you know, they might be a producer, but like what about education for somebody who's just going to become a media manager? It doesn't seem like that is a, uh, you know, like that is really a well outlined career path. Speaker 1 32:06 No, no, it's, it's interesting cause you know, this, this, I went to a major film school in LA and said, Hey, do you know where you guys interested in teaching media management and you know, teaching DIT and yeah, we have no interest in that whatsoever. I'm like, why? I'm like, well, you know, nobody comes to our film school to be a DIT or you know, media manager, they come here to become the next Spielberg, the next big director of the next big name. Right. And I'm like, great. How many of them actually get to that level? Right, right. Really. I mean, how many of them are actually have their name in a kiosk somewhere? Um, you know, from that perspective versus how many of them actually go in the industry and find a job being a DIT. And, and as I was talking to the, the, the professors there, they started saying, well, you know, we always have one kid who's, it was really good DIT and every group, every team uses that one kid. Speaker 1 32:54 And I'm like, awesome. Well how do you cater to them? Well, they said they typically leave. I mean, what do you mean they leave? They said, yeah, they don't end up finishing school. Why? Well, because they ended up getting a job, let's say. So what you're telling me is, is you're not catering to the actual jobs that are out there because these students are getting plucked. Who have an aptitude to manage content are getting plucked from your university before they finished school. You're not catering to them, but there's a need for them in industry. I mean the whole thing that is sad. I had one time aspired to be an actor. I thought I could be the next Bruce Willis. I went bald before he did. It didn't work out for me. But somewhere through that PA that I was listening to John Lovitz talk about the screen actors Guild and, and how 96% of the money was made by 4% of the members. And I thought, Oh nuts, I'm on the wrong side of this. Right, right. And then when watching the film credits roll, I looked at the hundreds of people working and making a living, doing what they loved. And that was a transition point for me to get from in front of the camera to behind the camera and look at the process. So that to me is sort of where this industry right now is. Where do you find that media manager? Where are you training them? It strikes Speaker 0 33:59 To me cause I went to a music school and you know, I have a, I have a degree in audio recording. Uh, but my, my degree came from, it's a bachelor of music and it came from, from a conservatory and I had a very music centered core curriculum that wasn't just about audio recording. Audio recording was my major. So I obviously had lots of classes in that. But I also had to learn about music theory and I had to learn about counterpoint and orchestration and you know, all of these things that are just inherent to the mechanics of music. We're not even talking about how to put notes together and like how to compose something that can move somebody emotionally. We're talking about just like the basic mechanics of how to read music, how to understand how the notes relate and things like that. Um, I didn't appreciate it at the time when I was 20 something in college, I just didn't understand. Speaker 0 34:45 You know, I, I was so above taking these courses, but now even in my day to day work, I look back on that and just the perspective that I got from, you know, from having to sort of be involved in that and learning that. And what strikes me is that what we really need is we need to incorporate this kind of education into a core curriculum. Instead of saying like, this is a major, you know, you're going to go to film school to major in media management. No, it's going to become part of the core curriculum that we, that we teach as part of a film major or whatever. Speaker 1 35:19 Multimedia communication. Sure, sure. I mean, I mean the reality is, I mean I look at some of these curriculums cause you know, I'm helping my daughter kind of decide where she wants to go to high school and she wants to do visual communications and we're looking at them as curriculums and it's like, you must have a hard drive. You know, you must have a fast enough hard drive. And I'm thinking to myself, well, okay, so they're going to be creating content. They're going to end there telling the kids to put it on a hard drive so they can, it can be portable. Well, when do they learn about Nazism and sands and how to organize and how to do a file structure. When did they learn about metadata in the naming schema or just building a naming schema, right? And a folder structure. Who is teaching that? Speaker 1 35:55 And the closest I can see right now, there are a few universities, a few high schools, a few colleges around there that I have partners with that are doing a little bit of education. But the bulk of it is coming from way outside the industry in the librarians. The librarians get it right because they've been cataloging things for years, assets to them on a shelf. They're the ones taking that same thought process and realizing, well, all this new catalogs are going to be purely digital. So we need to look at how we translate our metadata schema is over to the digital world. How we start cataloging, um, you know, digital assets versus, and I think that's probably the one place where we're going to see these people come from this next John rev employee because that's a, you know, as we deploy moms, the number one thing is, well, who's going to run it for us? Right. You know, and that's what the end user, I mean, they're, they're saying, well, I don't have time to run the man who's gonna run the man. Well, you need to hire a librarian. That's the truth of it. Speaker 0 36:48 Yeah. Firmly, firmly agree. Firmly would promote that stance. Yep. I do firmly believe that every organization that has a media manager, media asset management platform needs a stakeholder within the organization that understands not just the platform that you have, but like just the concepts behind it. Uh, what does all of it mean? What does it mean for the, for the editors, what does it mean for the producers? What does it mean for the organization itself to have this? And whether it's also about workflow orchestration and all that, you know, that is all important. And somebody within the organization that also understands all of the personalities behind all of those edit workstations and you know, how that content is coming in and understands the pipeline and the organization and how the content is ingested and shot and then edited and archived and all that. Someone's got to have a vision within the organization. Right? So, Speaker 1 37:42 Yep. No, and, and it's, you know, it's, we are learned early, early on. I mean, we've been at the man game a long time. Um, it's one of the reasons why I came over to this company because, you know, they were, they were going into the market, trying to educate the world on ma'am early in the game. And one of the things that we learned early on, if you sold the end user, the ma'am and said, have fun with that, they were very unsuccessful. Right? So then we realized same as you. Okay, you need a champion in your building. So we're going to come train you how to manage and maintain and utilize the man. And then we saw the success rate go up. Right. I've seen they were using it years later or months later even. Cause if you just drop them a piece of software and don't show them how it's going to change their life, it's not going to Speaker 0 38:23 Absolutely. Yeah. Or, or you know, a particular product or platform may demo really well, but you know, what I see on the screen may not equate to what I get when I double click that look, Speaker 1 38:36 Every demo you see online has been rehearsed. I mean that's the truth of it. So well you would hope, right? If you're not rehearsing it, get out. Um, yeah. I mean so I mean that is, that is the form and function is to show the client what they can achieve. The problem with it is no two workflows are the same. No two environments at the same, they have the same needs. They have the same problems, but they're going to approach it differently. Their naming scheme is going to be different. Their workflows are going to be different. The content is coming from different locations. So it requires a group like yours to actually sit down with them and walk it through and define it and also force, cause one thing we noticed, one of the first trainings I went to, um, was a client in the Midwest and they for a week, every day there was one guy that would come in and put three CA, three videos on the screen. Speaker 1 39:22 Which one do you like best? I'm trying to figure out what we're going to do for a proxy codec. And I'm like, okay. And you know, the whole team would vote on it. By day five, he still hadn't made a decision. Right. And it was just like this, this peer indecision, you know, of of well stop, pick one, just pick. It doesn't matter. You know, you just, somebody needs to help the client draw a line in the sand. If you let them as a, as a committee define the metadata schema, it'll be 300 fields big. Right? The reality is they're going to use seven. So it's, you know, it requires somebody to really hold their feet to the fire, push them to make decisions effectively. Because, you know, it was funny, I had the, one of the guys at CBS on air promotions who's a president of, he called me and he's like, look, we don't know what we don't know about ma'am. Like we just don't, we've never had one, so we don't know what to expect. So help us help us roll this out, help us make decisions, you know, let's get a starting point so that we can start to learn and experiment. So that a year from now, two years from now, we have a better idea of what our plan is. Speaker 2 40:19 Absolutely. I'm one of those questions and the qualifying process should always be what kind of codecs do you work with, right? When your editors insist on editing natively and that and that Kodak, right. Let's come in and what's going on. Yeah, Speaker 1 40:32 Yeah. No, I mean that's, that's spot on and that brings it right back around, right? It's helping the team to define what is the right codec for us to operate on. They will be better if they choose one, then allow themselves to be run by 10 Speaker 2 40:45 Sure. Dino and I'm just going to say it again. Not everybody has the luxury of making that decision, but then it's back to what platforms handle many different codecs in their native format. Right? You know, this is what are you going to render out? What's your mastery and delivery format going to be? Right? Speaking of delivery format, Nick, have you been running into much IMF lately? It's picking up, we're seeing it more, we're seeing it more as well. Inter operable mastering format. Why don't you talk about the interoperable mastering format, Ben? Well, um, so it's a fancy fancy wrapper that can encapsulate multiple versions of files and multiple versions of audio files all into one awesome little bundle that then you can to whatever destination needs it. And it's a way of encapsulating everything you might need. So if you want a proxy done, you want the high rise done, you want Spanish and French and German in English and Portuguese done. That's pretty cool. So this is a delivery format, right? So we don't shoot an IMF. Correct. Speaker 1 41:54 Which, which you know, and here's one of those points who, who developed in drove IMF the international monetary fund? No, I mean this is, this was defined by Netflix, right? Right. I mean, I mean, and so this is, you know, going back to that earlier, I mean, this is, you know, when you look at discovery, who defined, Hey, here's how we want you to deliver LTO. Netflix said, Hey guys, you know what, we're sick of playing the format Wars. Here's how you're going to deliver to us. Right? They drew a line in the sand and they put a standard out and they said, roll with it. And now again, other people are adopting to it. What's taken time is the manufacturers to get to, it is the software companies to figure out, Oh, maybe we should tie into this and you know, figure out a way to export directly to IMF. Speaker 1 42:37 Right. You know, and do the packaging. And so, you know, little by little now we're seeing, I mean, I think a year ago there were maybe two or three companies that could deliver or could package IMF and now they're, you know, it's every day that new one pops up, Hey, we just added IMF. I mean it was sort of like NAB three years ago. Everything was 4k then 3d and you know, and then where that was on their sign, they ripped that piece out and replaced it with IMF this last year. So it's, it's, it's good because it is building a standard that people can work with and there's an actual document that says, here's how you're going to do it. There's open source libraries for getting access to it and for building your own tools around it. And it's that first time when I can see like on the delivery side. Awesome. We've, we've all kind of agreed. Maybe there's a better way versus the wild wild West. Speaker 2 43:22 So this, this, yeah, you say that. It's interesting, but this strikes me as a situation, you know, we just said that this was a standard developed by Netflix. So this is, this is a situation where the maybe the biggest player just stood up and said, all right guys, this is how we're going to do it, right? For market, maybe free market. It's interesting how that works and doesn't work. And depending on the situation in this scenario, uh, Speaker 1 43:47 Well, I mean, you didn't see avid jump on it, right? You didn't see Adobe get in there and say, Ooh, we think we got an idea for how you can deliver. Um, because there's, there's not money to be made on that side for sure. Exactly. So you know, when you look at like the photo cams and the, you know, the big post houses of the world that are doing packaging for some of these larger organizations, you know, they're, they were deeply rooted in this, um, because you know, those are their primary clients. So yeah, it, it is being driven by an entity, but that is how this market has always done over the years. Right? Somebody, somebody ends up putting a line in the sand and saying, we're going to have to pick a pick up a horse because there isn't one organization doing it for them or driving it for them. Speaker 2 44:27 Absolutely. Right. Thanks to the adult film industry giving us VHS Speaker 3 44:32 And now Netflix for IMF. Speaker 1 44:36 Uh, that's so true. Yeah. Thank you Ben. Way to bring it around. You know, it's, you know, I think, I think the interesting thing now is how do we start to connect the dots for people? Not everybody's going to ever look, 10% of the world of the post houses need IMF. That's the reality of it, right? Because how many of them are actually doing the final mastering to go up to Netflix or Hulu or, or you know, Disney or one of those. So it's such a small signal to the industry, but it's probably one of the louder voices right now because Hey, it's the new big thing. It's like a shiny new camera. Something on that line. So the reality is now we look at, for the rest of the world, where are they delivering content to? They're going to YouTube, to Facebook, to their own LVP or going to some CDN somewhere there. Speaker 1 45:21 Their stuff lands on Amazon. Their stuff stays in house and only goes across to IP TV. The majority of that in the end is MPEG four, right? I mean, it's age to 64 it takes two 65 it's pretty standard codecs. So that sort of deliverable side really comes down to how do we simplify that delivery, because in the end, anybody can, well almost anybody can create that final master for 80% of the distribution of the world. But how do we simplify that story to get consistency, to get checks and balances to ensure that it's QC before it goes out, right? That's where those workflows come in now to say, well, let's build up a workflow that before you hit the upload button, you know your contents ready to go, everybody's checked off on it, right? We're all agreed that this is the final file that's going out and God forbid you actually QC more than Bob sits over there and goes, Hey, you got an extra frame of black there. And you know, there's great software tools out there for doing this. And I think, you know, what I see is in the broadcast world, it's pretty consistent. In the high end post production world is pretty consistent. Hey, corporate America, it's time to get a QC app. Speaker 3 46:22 Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm really both, um, happy and impressed by corporations like Netflix and Amazon who are pushing the boundaries on distribution and quality as well, because now we can stream for K and they're working. I know Netflix has recently done a whole lot of work on the audio side and making sure that the audio, if you've got really fat pipes and really good bandwidth, that it's perceptually lossless, they still use a lossy codec. But by the time it hits your ears, it should sound still extremely good in what, what they're calling perceptually lost less. And so God bless him for innovating. Speaker 1 47:05 Yeah, no, I mean, and, and the reality is it's, it's, while they're doing all that upstream, we have to look at the downstream side where most people watching this content, right? Is it a Roku stick, a fire TV, they're X-Box or God forbid you're like my children, you're stuck with a pair of binaural headphones on your iPad. Right? I mean, that's, that's the worst part about it is that it's, that goes back to that earlier message that we talked about like, Hey, if you're only going to distribute and you know, in standard Def, why are you recording in HD? Well, here's the same concept, right? We're building the highest common denominator, but the majority of the users are coming on devices that don't support that better audio or that better video right now that'll change that software. Speaker 2 47:44 Be smart enough to say, Oh, I'm on this device. You get this audio or this video. Which is amazing. Speaker 1 47:50 Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the whole concept of streaming and you know, the segmenting of video to allow it to dynamically adjust to the bandwidth, to the user, to the device as it's happening. I think that's one of the most astounding things cause that's really what's allowed us to proliferate on the web. We go back to the real video days. So the windows media video days, I mean if you didn't have the player you weren't in and the player wasn't on your device, the player was only on your desktop, so you were landlocked to a really bad laptop or computer. Now it's like, Oh man, we've got this device on my, my hand that does 4k and the audio is actually pretty good, but my kid's over on his iPad, which is an older one. That's a lesser device. It doesn't matter. We're watching the same show. Speaker 2 48:33 Yep, absolutely. Well that's a good talk. Thank you Nick Smith from JB and EI for uh, talking to us today. If you're not really used Nick Smith, time will only tell. Yes. Thank you so much. This has been a very good chat. A secret message. The Crow flies at midnight. So that's the codec Wars for today on the workflow show. Thank you for listening. If you have any further questions, we would like to address them. So email us at podcast at <inaudible> dot com or visit us at www dot <inaudible> dot com I would like to say thank you to my cohost, Ben Kilburg. You're welcome. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. And I'm Jason Whetstone. This is the workflow show. Thank you.